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Prejean urges end to death penalty

Sister Helen Prejean, author of the best-seller, Dead Man Walking, challenged the young people in the audience at Loyola College on September 13 to get active in the fight to end the death penalty.

“We will not have the death penalty in Maryland if you speak up,” said the 67-year-old nun.

In her talk to several hundred people at Loyola’s McGuire Hall, Sister Helen recounted in a folksy and humorous style her journey from being a teaching nun of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille in New Orleans to becoming an outspoken opponent of the death penalty.

Prejean, who entered the order when she was 18, taught seventh and eighth grade English and religion, and eventually became a director of religious education.

“I loved it!” she said.

But during the religious upheaval of the late 1970s, she recalled, “Some of the sisters said we needed to be involved directly with the poor.  I was on the other side of the argument.  I said, we’re not social workers!”

A “social justice nun” who came to talk to them helped to change her mind.

“She gave us the statistics about the huge injustices in the world.  She said Jesus preached the good news to the poor.  The good news was that they would be poor no longer.  He inaugurated a new kind of community that made people mad.”

The nun told the sisters that Jesus did things like touching people considered unclean, talking to women in public and letting a prostitute pour perfume on His feet.

“That is what led to His crucifixion,” said Prejean.

Moved by the sister’s arguments, Prejean decided to dedicate her life to the poor.  In 1981 she moved from the suburbs to the St. Thomas housing project in New Orleans.

“Everywhere I’m looking I’m learning – how the police treated poor people, and how they didn’t have good health care,” she said.  “This is the United States of America, and there are 48 million people who don’t have health care!”

In 1982, learning of a program for writing to prisoners, she wrote a letter to Patrick Sonnier, a death row inmate.

“The whole problem started, when I wrote to Patrick, he wrote back!” she said.  “He never asked me for anything, but I found out he had no one to visit him.”

Prejean remembered Jesus’ words, “I was in prison and you came to visit me,” and decided she would go to see Sonnier.

At the prison, locked in a small room, Prejean paced up and down with trepidation.

But when she finally saw Patrick, she said, “I was shocked.  I thought he would look different.  I couldn’t believe how human he was.  The two hours flew by.”

Patrick Sonnier and his brother Eddie had been convicted of killing a teen-aged boy and girl who had gone to a local “lovers’ lane” after a Friday night football game.

“These two kids were found face-down, both shot in the back of the head,” said Prejean.

She acknowledged that the crime was terrible, but still felt sympathy for Patrick.

Eddie had actually done the shooting, but he was serving a life term, while Patrick was to be executed, she said, adding, “That’s par for the justice system.”

This was only one of many inequities in the administering of the death penalty, she pointed out:  98.5 percent of all people on death rows are poor people, and over 90 percent were abused as children.

But she was also sympathetic to the families of the victims.  At a hearing for Patrick, in which she pleaded for clemency, she met the families of his two victims.

The girl’s family “was so furious with me, they walked past in thunderous silence,” she said.

But the boy’s father surprised her by asking her to pray with him.  In a chapel on a Friday, they prayed the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary together.

“He is the hero of Dead Man Walking,” said Sister.  “He taught me.  He prayed for everybody.  He prayed for his son David.  He prayed for Mrs. Sonnier, Patrick’s mama.  He gave her a basket of fruit, and told her, ‘We never know what our children will do.’”

Prejean began a victims’ advocacy group in New Orleans called Survive.

The Survive members, whose relatives had been crime victims, were mostly African-Americans.

Not one of the 40 cases in which their relatives had been victims ever came to trial, because the legal system doesn’t think it important when people of color are the victims, said Sister.

Prejean accompanied Sonnier to the electric chair.

“He was terrified; 1,900 volts of electricity were going to hit him when he was strapped in the chair.  But he was trying to protect me – he didn’t want me to be there.

“I said, ‘You’re not going to die without one loving face looking at you.  I’ll be the face of Christ for you.”

Prejean put her hand on his shoulder and as they walked to his execution, she read to him from the forty-third chapter of Isaiah.

“The first thing I did afterwards was throw up,” she said.  “They had just killed a human being.”

Dead Man Walking, her account of her experiences with Sonnier, was published in 1993.  It was made into a major motion picture starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn in 1996, and became the basis for an opera in 2000.

After Sonnier, Prejean continued her prison ministry.  Her book, The Death of Innocents, published in 2004, is the story of two men whom she also accompanied to their executions.

She amassed evidence not produced at their trials that she believes proves their innocence.

“Pope John Paul II got involved and I got to have a dialog with him about these cases,” she said.

“I had hoped the Supreme Court would declare the death penalty unconstitutional,” she admitted.

“But when I heard about the appointments of [Chief Justice John] Roberts and [Justice Samuel] Alito, I knew they were going to keep the death penalty forever.  I knew they were always going to vote with people like [Justice Antonin] Scalia.  They’re ideologues.”

But, she told her audience, “People like you give me hope.  We can find a way to get this message out, if you young people get active and talk to your legislators – Maryland isn’t a death penalty state like Louisiana.”

Sister Prejean’s talk was sponsored by the Mount Saint Agnes Alumnae Association.

Prejean was recently disinvited to be the keynote speaker at an October 1 dinner in the Diocese of Duluth after her name appeared as one of 90 signers on an August 3 New York Times ad calling for the removal of President Bush from office.

An archdiocesan spokesperson said the problem was that the ad was politically partisan, and the diocese has both moral and legal obligations to remain nonpartisan.

However, in addition to criticizing Bush’s stance on the Iraq war and on other political issues, the ad also criticized his stand against abortion and contraception.

In a letter on her web site, Prejean said that she has since asked to be removed from the ad because she did not agree with its stand on abortion.

If she had seen the final version of the ad, she would not have signed it, she said.